April 2026

I am coming towards the end of my role as Head of Department at LSE. It has been my primary professional identity for six years at this stage. I will be handing over in August. I was head during covid, industrial unrest, the development of scaled LLM use etc,. But also at a time when psychology and behavioural science was growing quite a lot within LSE. We have hired a lot of new staff and built new programmes including a lot of new executive education.  I have also been teaching and co-directing the MSc in Behavioural Science. Heads of Department come and go in UK universities without much fanfare (other than huge joyous expressions of relief to be handing over) but I feel something different in this case, it has been the main role in my career so far and I learned a lot about people doing it and formed very strong professional connections with a range of people. I have been working on an interesting project reviewing psychology and behavioural science over the 130 years in LSE and also situating the current decade within that, including organising some photographs and documents to deposit in the LSE archive, including this one below of our current Department staff. 

Over the next year, I am trying to build a new research group broadly at the intersection of ethical aspects of behavioural public policy and economic psychology. My research has generally looked at subjective aspects of policy, including how people are affected by economic circumstances, how we deal with administrative burdens, and how we conceptualise ethical aspects of the interaction between institutions and citizens with the psychological aspects in mind. I am going to do a lot more soul-searching into how exactly the research group will be built. It will partly nest aspects of the Wider World Initiative that I have built with students and colleagues over the last five years, as well as the FORGOOD initiative we have been working on, and my contribution to the behavioural aspects of the Building Sustainable Societies Theme of the Global School of Sustainability. It will also include a number of existing PhD students and research fellows who have been working with me on economic psychology related topics, as well as collaborators. I don't want it to be solely focused on academic research papers and it will include people who are working in public policy and industry in various capacities. I want to create new ways of using behavioural science concepts in ethical and interesting ways.